


Through Doors

by nayanroo



Series: Luminous Beings [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Everyone is a bad Jedi, F/M, things never go right on missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 14:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nayanroo/pseuds/nayanroo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Jedi Order knows a good team when they see it, but unfortunately even the best-planned missions always have something go hilariously wrong.  That's when the true strength of any bond is shown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through Doors

“Jane—“

“Quiet.”

“But can I—“

“ _No_.” Jane peered up at her companion, taking a moment to roll the tension out of her free shoulder. Her purple blade hovered bare millimeters above the one crucial bit of wiring in the console; it didn’t waver or bobble in the slightest, though it took no small amount of control to do so. If uninterrupted she would draw on the Force, meditate while she waited for the the nudge from one of the others on the team signaling the plan was going ahead. Alas, _uninterrupted_ was the one thing that seemed impossible anytime she went out on a mission with Thor. Not that she ever got _too_ cross with him – by now Jane knew it was that Thor was so full of life that he simply couldn’t contain it all at once and moved around to let off the pressure – but there were times he threatened to drive her completely barvy.

“Aren’t you watching to make sure there isn’t anyone coming?” she asked.

“We are in the bowels of this place,” Thor replied. He had one of his lightsabers out and was twirling it absently in his hand, the hilt spinning above his palm just a bit too long for it to be without any Force interference at all. “Even the engineering personnel rarely come down to this level. We are in no danger of discovery.”

“The last time you said that,” Jane muttered, working hard to maintain her focus, “We all walked into a nest of very broody gundarks.”

Thor paused, recalling the incident in question, and then grinned. “That was fun, was it not? We fought our way out valiantly.”

“We fought, all right. We fought the _gundarks_ , and Loki had to rescue us.”

He made a face. “Loki didn’t do _all_ the rescuing.”

“No, the rest of us helped him shift the rocks at the cave entrance while _you_ were still chasing the biggest and meanest of them around the cave and yelling at the top of your lungs enough to bring the rest down on us.”

Thor opened his mouth as it to protest, then closed it again. “Oh,” he said, barely containing a smile – it leaked out in the way his lips twitched at the corners. “Right. I remember, now.”

For a moment they stared at each other, then Thor started to chuckle, his smile breaking out in full, and Jane had no choice but to follow. Thor, once of Alderaan and now of the Order, had an infectious good nature and a broad and easy smile. Neither one was the sole reason for the fact they made a good team, but they were a good balance for Jane. No, the reason they made such a good team—

Jane’s shoulders hitched as she felt the little mental _push_ from each of the other two teams. “They’re ready,” she breathed, and set herself again. Her blade had not wavered even through their little interlude, she noted with pride; the laughter had helped restore her, too, and now she stretched out to the other two tasked with cutting the other shield controls – her own padawan Darcy, and Hogun – and then stretched into them, letting the battle meld they’d practiced flow into her. It was dangerous to do this, and yet they’d decided it was worth the risk to ensure that the timing was precise to the second. Once the shields were down the other two of their strike team, even now approaching on ballistic courses in their shielded pods, would be able to get into the station and complete their part of the mission.

For a moment, in three different points in the station above Ylesia, three Jedi stood completely motionless with their lightsabers in their hands; had anyone been watching carefully, they would have seen they were even breathing in unison, slowly as if waiting for something.

That something came in the form of a second push from one of the incoming team, and at the exact same second all three of them twitched their blades downward, slicing neatly through the wiring bundle that the console used to communicate with the power supply stations. Without that command in place the shields shut down; far above them, alarms began to sound.

Thor had not just been there to keep an eye out for potential interlopers; a Force meld was a powerful tool for Jedi who worked together it was true, but it was also dangerous. In untrained hands, those in a meld could slip into each other’s heads on a more intrinsic level, to where the users of the meld blended together mentally, sharing thoughts and feelings even when not using the technique. There were records of even Masters going mad from it, and the Order could not lose three of its most talented Jedi at one go. Thor was there to make sure Jane came back to herself out of the meld, though he would have done it even had the Council not tasked him with it specially. The thought that Jane would be forever trapped in a mental limbo was not one he even wanted to consider.

“Jane?” he asked, putting his hands on her shoulders. For a moment she exhaled long and low, her whole being suffused with the warm glow of the Force, and Thor could not breathe at all. But then she drew in a lungful of air and opened her eyes and smiled at him, and he smiled too because Jane, his Jane, was back to herself.

“We’d better get out of here,” she said. For a moment her hand came up. Jane was small for a human and her fingers were made for handling delicate machinery – but her hand on his made warmth spread through all of him, and as they were alone, he turned his palm to bring her knuckles to his lips, to kiss them, before letting her hand go with reluctance. Bound they were by the Order’s strictures, but there were some things neither one of them could simply avoid.

“Yes, of course,” he replied, and reached back to pull up the hood of his robe. Jane did the same, and with a quick peek outside to assure themselves there was nobody around, the two of them darted out of the control room and along the dim catwalk, using the Force to speed and muffle their steps.

*

The deckmaster of Hangar Three-Aurek was meticulous in the things she supervised; when she came on shift she went to work, ensuring that fuel tanks were topped and the decks were swabbed to a high polish. The station catered to government officials on vacation, and to the very wealthy, and even a hangar generally used only by crew was not subjected to lessened scrutiny because of it. If anything because she was Klatooinian she felt she had more to prove to her superiors. It was rare that those of Klatooine left – if only because the Hutts owned them, more or less – and when they did they were often met with ridicule for their canid appearance. Kolla was not going to let that happen to her, though.

So when the two pods burst through the magnetic field at the entrance to the hangar and skidded across the polished black floor, leaving long ugly scars in their wake, she was appropriately horrified. Moreso when one came to a hard stop against a stack of coolant tanks, causing them to topple and roll across the floor. Worse yet, the top of the pod burst off and a figure in a dark robe leaped out, landing lightly before her. Not used to this kind of thing happening, Kolla could only manage a high-pitched whine as the hooded head of the figure looked to the other pod, which was still in motion when its top burst off and a brown-robed figure performed a graceful somersault in midair to land not twenty feet away.

“It would seem that our friends did their job,” the first figure said to the second. “Though I believe we’ve given our new acquaintance here quite a fright.”

“Enough of your chattering,” the second figure – a woman, whereas the first was a man undoubtedly – said, pulling a long cylinder out from under her robe. Kolla recognized it for what it was immediately and started to babble.

“No trouble here,” she said quickly. “Nothing we need the Jedi for, don’t mind the mess I can make it right—“

“Quiet,” the man said, and suddenly Kolla felt a strange calm descend on her. Beneath the man’s hood she could see a pair of piercing eyes that looked almost gray in the light of the hangar. They caught her and Kolla could not look away. Why would she want to? He was speaking yet, a long-fingered hand peeking out of his sleeve. His fingers twitched just slightly.

“You will clean this up and move ships away from this hangar if any come,” he said. “Until you will receive one fifteen minutes hence. You will speak to nobody and direct your crew to do the same. Understood?”

“Understood,” Kolla echoed vaguely. It made sense, after all. “Clean this up. Move ships away from this hangar. One will come in fifteen minutes that I will let in.”

“Very good,” the man said. “Go about your business, Kolla of Klatooine.”

“I’ll go about my business, Master Jedi,” Kolla murmured, and turned on her heel, padding across the scarred floor. The two robed figures watched her go a moment before moving off into the station briskly.

“Nicely done,” the woman said in a low voice. Barely visible under his hood, the man smiled.

“I can be _very_ persuasive,” he replied. “Now, we’ve not much time. Best keep the talking to a minimum.”

*

The plan had been a simple one; take out the shield so Sif and Loki could get aboard and apprehend the man who’d murdered the son of a Senator and then fled here to where Republic law enforcement couldn’t touch him, take him into custody and take him back to Coruscant to stand trial. With the shield out the three teams could meet up at the hangar while the other two accomplished their goal. It was straightforward, it played to the strengths of the assembled team.

But as with most plans, the first chance it got to truly go sideways, it took.

The shield teams’ routes had been picked specifically because they were only rarely traveled – maintenance passages, mostly, narrow and dim. Schedules had been carefully studied prior to arrival to ensure nobody would be in those passages that day at that time.

Of course, nobody had anticipated the fact that a piece of debris from an incoming ship had managed to escape the field it’d been held in and tear into the side of the station. The hull had been patched to keep atmosphere from escaping, but it had torn up some machinery when it’d made it inside. Nothing vital… but enough to send a maintenance crew into the area for work that _happened_ to be scheduled on the day and at the very time of the mission.

Right when Thor and Jane were making their way down the corridor. The shields going down had already raised an alarm, and so when the human working on one of the pipes carrying something or other to the upper levels caught sight of two Jedi coming toward him, he wasted no time in calling out on his comlink before Jane could get to him and press the Force into him, sending him to sleep.

“ _Typical_ ,” she grumbled, lowering the man to the floor. “Nothing can just go according to plan.”

“That would make it quite boring,” Thor replied with a grin. “Keep going – I’ll set up a distraction to keep pursuit off our backs.”

Jane narrowed her eyes until they were slits, the brown of her irises barely showing. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing that will bring us harm, I assure you.” But he was entirely too excited, and Jane thought (not for the first time, either) that the fact Thor had made it through the Trials to Knighthood at all was proof the Force worked small miracles every day. “But I do not want you to be in danger. Go, I will catch up.”

Against her better judgment Jane jogged up around a bend in the corridor, moving a bit faster when Thor caught up and passed her.

“Thor—“

“No time,” he said, taking her hand. “Any second now—“

The explosion knocked them both off their feet, fire rippling up the corridor – only to be sucked back out as the hull patch gave. The howl of wind filled the passage… as did the sound of airtight doors slamming shut behind them.

“That could be a problem,” Thor said half to himself.

“ _Run!_ ”

They weren’t fast enough to reach the end of the corridor; a door slammed down in their faces with the hatch into the main part of the station in sight. Jane turned in a quick circle.

“Do you remember the schematics we looked at on the way here?” she asked. “What’s on the other side of this bulkhead?”

“The—ah, I see.” Thor grinned and pulled out his lightsaber, igniting its silvery blade with obvious relish. “You are clever, Master Jane.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, watching as he plunged the blade into the wall and cut a rectangle through it. While the edges were still hot and glowing, he used the Force to pull out the plug of metal and insulation and set it against the wall behind them, bending to look through—

—right into the faces of Darcy and the three Knights.

“Where’ve you two been?” Volstagg asked.

“We’ve got to get moving,” Fandral added. “I hate to say so, but it seems our presence here has been noticed.”

“Was that explosion really necessary?” Darcy asked. Other Jedi would have chastised their padawans for speaking so, but Jane just sighed.

“I’m not sure myself,” she replied. “Come on, let’s go before our ride leaves without us.”

*

That was how they came to be running down the corridor toward the hangar, with station security on their tail. Why was it, Jane wondered as she pelted down the corridor, that they always seemed to end up with people shooting at them?

“I still think we could have done it without the explosion!” she yelled as they ran along with their lightsabers activated. Using the Force to bat the bolts away, harmlessly burying themselves into bulkheads and floors, was second nature to all of them at this point.

“Where would the fun be in that?” Thor asked as they skidded around a corner. She could see the entrance to the hangar now, and coming into it—

“Heimdall’s on his way!” she said.

The Order had its own fleet of ships – mostly starfighter-size, made to fit one or two Jedi as they went about their business in the galaxy. But they did employ shuttles and transports of their own, each one blazoned with the coppery-colored insignia of the Jedi. The _Bifrost_ was one such transport, and for this mission they’d managed to get the best pilot in the Order to help them. Master Heimdall was not verbose, or given to particularly grand feats of Force ability, but when he did speak or act, it was in ways that one could not help but pay attention to. His piloting skills were truly legendary though, and as they ran into the hangar they watched the incoming transport smoothly decelerate through the magnetic field and land in a hangar that was in fact rather too small for it.

Unfortunately, the guards pursuing them had brought along friends.

They made their stand behind one of the stacks of coolant and fluid barrels – dangerous, with blaster fire going every which way and lightsabers waving around, but there was precious little cover elsewhere between here and the lowered ramp of the _Bifrost_.

Kneeling behind the barrels, Jane thumbed the comlink on her wrist. “Heimdall, do you read?”

“ _I read you_.”

“Are Loki and Sif aboard yet?”

“ _They have what we came for but they are taking a roundabout way – I told them to go around the main entrance. They are close but not close enough yet._ ”

“Okay, great,” Jane said, mind whirling. “Click the comlink twice when they’re close enough for us to just make a break for it, okay? We’ll hold these guys off as long as it takes.”

“ _Understood. Be careful._ ”

Jane pulled her lightsaber off her belt again but stayed down for a moment, watching Thor. He was big, all muscle under his navy blue tunic. More than that he had chosen to learn how to dual-wield lightsabers, and his physicality made Jar’Kai almost a natural choice, for his strength, even without Force augmentation, could overcome any handicap raised by being unable to throw his whole weight behind a two-handed strike. He did not have the agility that Loki or Fandral possessed, and she feared what could happen if he attempted to follow Sif down the Way of the Vornskr, but in the moment now she felt pulled in to him as surely as if he had lifted her with the Force.

His silver blades hummed through the air, crossing and slashing and batting away the shots of the guards at the main entrance to the hangar. It was beautiful to watch, because it was not just sight that Jane used. Thor drew the Force in to himself and it flowed out of him like a hot river, washing over Jane as he used it. The Force guided his movements, let them blend with Hogun’s and Darcy’s, and then her own as Jane stepped out and added her blade to the fray. When she could, she let the Force guide her hand to bat bolts into the hands or weapons of those shooting, disabling them but not killing them, but it was difficult to do. She was a scientist, one who studied rather than one who fought. Perhaps that was why—

A ripple in the Force made her stretch out her senses and she touched the white-hot glow of Sif (a star perpetually caught in nova) and Loki (the brilliance of a solar flare, but never transient and just as disruptive), and felt a knot between her shoulders relax. There was another with them, someone smaller and more fluttering in the Force – someone who wasn’t a Jedi.

Thor must have felt it too, because for the barest moment he glanced back over his shoulder to the dark-robed man – he and Loki had ever been close, though in their age group Thor had been the favorite if only because his personality would not allow him to be second to anyone – and that was when first one bolt, then a second, slipped through his whirling defenses.

She felt the pain – _right shoulder, high up shattering the clavicle, left calf through the muscle, thought that one had buried itself in the deck_ – as if it were her own pain, and actually for a moment thought she’d been the one shot before she realized the burning was all but faded, and that Thor was struggling back to his feet with a charred hole in the shoulder of his cloak, showing angry red skin through it. His face was a grimace of pain, but when more bolts flew at them he gamely raised the lightsaber in his left hand and batted a few of them away, though at that point the others had moved together.

Jane heard two clicks on her comlink – Loki and Sif, and their unwilling guest, were aboard. It was time to do something; glancing around the hangar walls, she spied what looked like tanks, or hoppers of some kind, and stretched out with the Force. She was small but the Force was _everything_ and _everywhere_ , and when Jane reached out with her hands and grasped the hoppers with the Force, it was as though she was much larger than herself. With an enormous wrenching motion she flung the metal things down in front of the main hangar bay entrance, blocking the blaster and then ducked to the side, shutting off her lightsaber and slipping an arm around Thor’s waist.

“C’mon, flyboy,” she said, over the sound of the ship powering up its engines.

“We can hold them off!” he said, brandishing the weapon in his left hand. Jane reached out with the Force and called the lightsaber he’d dropped when his shoulder had been hit to her hand and tucked it into her belt.

“We’ve got to get aboard the ship!” she said, for Thor’s benefit as well as the others. “C’mon, everyone!” And with that, she hauled Thor back and turned them to the boarding ramp. He hobbled along quickly enough beside her, but Jane could feel how much pain he was in not only through the Force but in the way his body had broken out into a clammy sweat, and the way he stumbled when their feet hit the slope of the ramp. Darcy ducked in quickly and slipped her arm around his other side, but he hissed when he tried to put an arm over her shoulders too, and once they were up in the transport itself she dropped back again as Jane took Thor through the corridor to the medical suite and sat him down.

She had always had a way of losing herself in her work. Jane would not let hurt and pain stop her, as she had never let anything stop her; before being taken as a padawan she had been on the brink of being sent to the Jedi Corps, full of hopefuls who had never been good enough. In those sleepless nights on the cusp of her thirteenth birthday, Jane had often spent hours with her eyes squeezed shut, telling herself that she was good enough, she knew she was, and if the others didn’t see it then it was their loss. Master Selvig had seen it though, and taken her in, and taught her the names of the stars.

She went back to that; Jane was no healer but she could tend wounds like these blaster bolts and had done it many times before, on herself and others, with medical suites much less well-provisioned than this. Dimly she was aware of others coming and going, some touching her shoulders, of Thor speaking to her, but she worked to pull burned cloth out of the two neat holes, to do what needed to be done to make sure he didn’t go into shock on the way back to the Temple.

It took Thor nudging at her in the Force and to get her to stop. Jane sat back on her haunches and looked at him, and then (as they were alone) pushed sweaty blond hair out of his face. His eyes were unnaturally bright, but his smile was only a little shaky.

“My Jane,” he murmured. “You have done more than enough. Rest and tend to yourself; I will pass the trip in a healing trance. Upon our return to Coruscant I shall be better than new.” For a moment their eyes met, and their minds slipped alongside each other, probing to make sure the other was all right. Jane’s hands tightened on Thor’s, and then she stood, letting them go.

“All right,” Jane replied quietly. “But—“

“No.”

“Thor, listen—“

“Jane.” He smiled at her. “I am all right, truly. It is not as though I have shrapnel all through me, they are but blaster bolts.”

She smiled too, then, and stood, only looking back once to see that he had already dropped into a healing trance. He would be all right, she knew. Thor was more resilient than most, which was good because he was always getting himself into trouble, and usually her and Darcy along with him. But maybe that was why they worked so well together. It wasn’t a matter of Thor taking her through doors she hadn’t even known were there. He just showed her where they were and she did the walking.

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the same timeline as The Heat of A Thousand Young Stars and Mosso; I'm going with the tentative series name of Luminous Beings. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
